Delmaine Fine Foods is one of the foremost suppliers of locally manufactured and imported food to top hotels, restaurants and all major supermarket chains. It is also a major supplier of fine wine and beverages to restaurants, hotels, and off-licence premises.

In 2008, the Delmaine Fine Foods Group consisted of two separate businesses, Delmaine Fine Foods and Allberry House. Both companies were operating on outdated systems that were not meeting changing customer and business requirements. The supermarket chains – Delmaine’s major customers – were encouraging suppliers to implement full e-commerce solutions. At this stage however, invoicing was the only operation carried out electronically.

The company was seeking a well-supported, modern Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system that would enable all its operations to run on a single, integrated system which could meet its batch and process manufacturing, including batch and use-by date tracking requirements, as well as providing much better access to information than its existing systems. Technology that would work across both businesses allowing the businesses to merge and share information was essential.

“We required a modern ERP system that would integrate with all of our existing systems and give us a single view over the entire organization,” says chief financial officer, Steve Burfield-Mills.

Delmaine selected Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 with the help of its partner Adaptable Solutions.

Mr Burfield-Mills says longevity of the software played an important role in choosing the solution.

“We needed to be assured the product was going to be around on a long term basis. Another key factor was the amount of money Microsoft commits to R&D. It was important to us that there would be money spent on developing the product to meet the markets’ changing requirements,” says Steve.

Delmaine has diverse manufacturer requirements to take into account and AX’s ability to incorporate batch and process manufacturing was a huge selling point.

“For example, the AX system has a broader range of functionality allowing it to handle both a Bill of Material (BoM), essentially a recipe, as well as a formula - which provides instruction of what percentage of ingredients to use, regardless of the size of the batch. The previous software we had could only handle one or the other.”

Mr Burfield Mills says another advantage of AX is that it has its own forecasting and quality modules already integrated into the system rather than third party products that needed to be integrated.

“This allows us to hold a lot more business information in the one system than we could previously,” he says.

“In our business we also have to deal with the costing of imported shipments. AX is able to work out what our product cost is, integrating product (including foreign currency), freight and duty costs and can monitor all those costs against a standard.”

Mr Burfield-Mills says another selling point of the new system is that it comes with an online analytical processing tool (OLAP).

“We use this to slice and dice data. It’s much more powerful that what we have had before and has significantly enhanced our sales reporting capabilities,” he says.

Deployment of the solution was initiated in June 2008 and went live throughout the organization on 1 December 2008.

Mr Burfield-Mills says the technology has enabled Delmaine to operate full e-Commerce solutions with its major supermarket customers, Foodstuffs and Progressive, which provides the company with a major competitive advantage.

It has also allowed the company to integrate the data back into Dynamics AX from its GS1 Net implementation (Global Standards) with Foodstuffs, and will go live with Progressive either late 2011 or 2012.

One of the key benefits of the new system is that it allows Delmaine to batch control stock. This means it can track its product by batch and use-by date which is a key customer requirement, and also means the company can more effectively manage its short shelf life products within its warehouses.

Mr Burfield-Mills says following the merger, the business has undertaken major restructuring. This involves closing sites in East Tamaki, Tauranga and Christchurch and moving the majority of its manufacturing to a new site in Mt. Wellington.

“We wouldn’t have been able to carry out this restructuring with our old IT systems. Microsoft Dynamics AX was fantastic because of the ease of getting data in and out of the system.  It enabled us to move ahead with the next stage of our business evolution.”

“We now have the whole group on the same system, giving us the ability to view information across the whole business.”

Mr Burfield-Mills says Delmaine is planning to build on the solution by implementing RF Warehousing once the business restructuring is complete.

“This will give us additional operational efficiencies within the warehouse and manufacturing environment.”

Delmaine Fine Foods is now perfectly positioned for the future, with a centralized view of the whole organization, and a system that gives the business competitive advantage in a highly competitive industry.

“We wouldn’t have been able to carry out this restructuring with our old IT systems. Microsoft Dynamics AX was fantastic because of the ease of getting data in and out of the system.  It enabled us to move ahead with the next stage of our business evolution” - Delmaine Fine Foods’ chief financial officer, Steve Burfield-Mills.

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